With pedestrian fatalities mounting, US proposes tougher vehicle design rules | Hacker News Reader

With pedestrian fatalities mounting, US proposes tougher vehicle design rules

npr.org

36 pointsgeox18 comments

> Traffic and pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. climbed sharply for over a decade before leveling off last year. The reasons for that rise are complicated, and likely include road and sidewalk design, an increase in speeding and a corresponding decline in law enforcement, as well as the growing size and weight of vehicles.

Ahem, what about drivers staring at their damn phones? Can we increase penalties for distracted driving that injures people? My neighbor was killed walking down the sidewalk by a moron texting in his lap, and he got probation..

Also interacting with touchscreen dashboard.

Saying this as someone in a jurisdiction that has increased penalties for driving and using your phone, and implemented camera technology to detect drivers doing this.

Without wanting to minimise the other factors in any way, my personal peeve is the ridiculous size of behemoth SUVs and what in my country are called "utes" (used by trades-people and country-folk initially but now becoming a status symbol for urbanites). These things have ballooned so much that often, when I'm in a sedan next to one I feel like I've pulled up next to a monster truck. The reduced near-field visibility, the fact that the sheer height means pedestrians are more likely to be dragged under the vehicle than thrown over. I am looking forward to a day when this insane fad is history (I'm not optimistic).

As a fellow citizen of a ute loving nation, I think the rapid inflation of these bloated moon rovers was really just softening us up for the introduction of the full sized Dodge, Ford, and Chevy abominations I'm starting to see regularly. I swear there is some correlation between what feels like increasing hostility and the popularity of 'aggressive' vehicles. Dog help us all.

In EU the number of pedestrian fatalities decreased between 2010 and 2019 from 5962 to 4628 per year and kept at around 20% proportionally the whole time [1].

EDIT: in 2022 it was even better - around 3700 per year and 18.1% of the total traffic casualties [2].

You can also see per-country stats and graphs. It's been steadily decreasing basically everywhere in EU.

It's the US car-centric culture that is the problem, not the phones.

[1] https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

I fully agree with distracted driving, but also think this beyond the car size though. I think those should be limited, but will be met with that’s going to be met with resistance. The US is just completely hostile to pedestrians both in how they build roads and how drivers think of pedestrians. I’m all for rules for car sizes for other reasons but this is cultural problem the US has and needs to solve.

This last month I’ve been in around Paris and felt SO much safer walking and respected by drivers than I do walking around my house a city in twin cities.

Pretty hard to catch people in the act of fiddling with their phones while driving, at least directly.

However, were police to get extremely aggressive about the abysmal lack of turn signal use in recent years...

Fix the built environment and the rest will follow.

Narrow streets, tight corners, wide sidewalks, trees. Make it clear that the city is for people, not cars. Make driving painful. Make the alternatives easy.

We are subsidizing disabling technologies. They make our people fat, our air dirty, and our environment ugly.

Fix the built environment.

[dupe]

Proposal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41490941

Is nobody going to say that a lack of education for pedestrians would contribute to this?

As a professional driver for decades I see more people stepping onto the black death strip from the safe kerb without a look or thought year on year.

It's very easy to blame drivers. It's very easy to make rules for them. It's very easy to punish them. It's very hard to swerve into solid metal oncoming vehicles to avoid hitting the soft and yielding organic material which appeared suddenly in the space you're moving into.

Honestly, reinvigorate the steel industry and put any kind of barrier along the sidewalk/pavement to stop this careless attitude towards their own safety.

Second order effects would include stopping delivery drivers from loading anywhere they please, making people courteously give way to other pedestrians (which may introduce a long needed civility to random interactions), and unblocked movement for white cane and wheelchair users.

“Education for pedestrians” is very difficult, maybe impossible. You’d have to reach and convince 100% of the population, including homeless people who we can’t even convince to stay in free shelters.

Even then, there are still fatalities of completely innocent pedestrians. Near me two kids were killed when someone hit them crossing at the cross walk with their parent. Driver confused the gas and brake.

Fencing in the entire sidewalk seems impossible in most cases as access to street parking and driveways is needed on most roads. I have seen fences put on the median in a few cases to discourage crossing.

If it were taught to the young, as it was when I was a youth, it should become a behaviour aped (consciously or otherwise) by peers.

Putting a token barrier up in city centres wouldn't restrict access, and would help root the distinction even when in other areas.

Yes, of course this isn't a 'magic bullet' to cure fatalities, but it could go a long way to (ready for it ...) curbing them (groan).

Part of a wider plan, and one with many upsides.

> Honestly, reinvigorate the steel industry and put any kind of barrier along the sidewalk/pavement to stop this careless attitude towards their own safety.

You're kidding, right? ...right?

Pedestrian education is an industry sponsored way to put the blame for tragedy caused by bad road design and bad car design onto individuals.

People wouldn’t need to step off the curb if roads were designed to allow them to cross more than once every mile. They would need to step into traffic if roads had frequent under or overpasses rather than just zebra stripes.

There’s a great podcast episode here [0] covering the history of companies shifting the burden of safety from themselves to individuals and convincing regulators to do the same.

> “Listening to music was not associated with higher crash risk.”

> “‘Distracted’ pedestrians were more likely to cross with the light and use the crosswalk.”

> Pedestrian risks were highest in several metropolitan areas of Florida “that are known more for their inhospitable streetscapes than their distracted walkers.”

0:https://citationsneeded.medium.com/the-great-neoliberal-burd...

You have a point here that I have also noticed in a more rural/suburban setting. The number of adults, who presumably have a driver's license (or, at minimum, received some level of driver's ed in their secondary schooling), who don't know which side of the road pedestrians walk on/bicycles ride in is astounding and, in my experience, increasing. Add to this pedestrians who hop on and off the curb without notice, cyclists who swerve all over both lanes or ride at night without lights and reflectors, and people in roads in dark clothing and no lights.

It's gotten to the point that it's been frustrating and frightening to drive anywhere (dependent on how light it is).

Whenever I observe pedestrians walking on the sidewalks, maybe 30/40% of them do so looking at their screens, walk the dog? Better check your feeds, waiting for the traffic light? Time to see what’s new. I don’t know if i’m just a cranky old man but I see people getting dumber by the minute, I’ve witnessed guys riding bicycles hands-free with the phone on their hands, driving mopeds with the phone on their left hand (mopeds have 2 brake levers on the handlebar, no brake pedals) it’s just that the pedestrians are the softer ones.

IIRC there were rules for safer and greener vehicles, but these were sidestepped by making more vehicles in the light truck category?

There were CAFE regulations back in the mid 2000s that started changing things, and by 2020 made it harder to sell an ICE vehicle that didn't meet fuel economy standards.

Thus you ended up with more SUVs, and by 2020 you had some automakers (e.g. Ford) stop selling cars altogether in the US market.

Some references:

- https://youtu.be/mQDegCqiVnU? - a video by Vox covering the topic.

- https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10871/7

"The light truck standard was increased to 20.7 mpg in 1996, where it remained until 2005. NHTSA promulgated two sets of standards in the mid-2000s for MYs 2005-2007 and MYs 2008-2011, increasing the light truck standard to 24.0 mpg. In 2007, Congress enacted the Energy Independence and Security Act (P.L. 110-140), mandating a phase-in of higher CAFE standards reaching 35 mpg by 2020. This was the last legislation to set fuel economy goals"

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